RZA and Russell Crowe Featured in Latest Character Trailers from The Man With the Iron Fists

10.23.12 by Ryan

SHARE:

One has iron fists, the other has a rotating blade gun.

Musician-turned-actor-turned-writer-director-and-actor RZA has called his upcoming kung fu flick The Man With the Iron Fists the "most challenging" project of his career, and, after watching the movie's trailers, it's easy to see why. While RZA had help writing the script from Eli Roth (Hostel) and has Quentin Tarantino "presenting," the martial arts movie set in 19th Century China (and shot in the country as well) was, no doubt, a daunting directorial debut.

So far, RZA appears to be up for the challenge. Previous character trailers introduced Bronze Lion (Cung Le) and Madame Blossom (Lucy Liu), but the latest trailer introduces RZA's character The Blacksmith, who becomes a human weapon to protect his village.

Having apparently built a good rapport with RZA from working together on 2010's The Next Three Days, the next character trailer features Academy Award-winner Russell Crowe, who appears in the movie as the opium-addicted Jack Knife, whose titular weapon is more complicated than it sounds.

The Man With the Iron Fists is also the project that kept RZA from appearing in Tarantino's upcoming Django Unchained, where, ironically, as RZA told Movies.com, he would have again played Thaddeus, aka The Blacksmith.

When Quentin finished Django, he read the whole thing to me — it was 90-some pages at the time. I spent a few days with him. And this is right before I went to China. And then when I came back I was like, "Yo Quentin — we should have Thaddeus... one of the slaves is Thaddeus!" So this way, we'd tie both movies together. And I told him that'd be the ultimate tie-in that'd really rock the fans. And he's like, "Yeah, you're right!"

Well, I couldn't do it. We tried to do it. There was a tie! And because of the schedule for Iron Fists, I had to let another character do it. I didn't make it into the film. The idea was that Thaddeus would be on the auction block. You've seen the trailer, when the camera passes by all the guys? So Thaddeus is supposed to be on that line.